Monday, June 16, 2014

This
picture shows what it looks like to have too many apples in one spot.
We have to go through certain rows and knock some off by hand. If we
just left the apples to grow like this, we'd have a lot of apples but
way too small, and possibly the tree limbs would break from the weight
of them all.

For
the size of this tree, it has too many apples too, even though the
apples aren't clustered together as much as the picture above. On some
varieties, if you leave too many on the tree one year, like Honeycrisp,
the next year there will be no apples, or at least very little.
We don't have to thin every variety every year. We just play it by ear and see what each variety looks like.

Codling moth trap in apples

We
also are paying attention to our bug traps in the apples! Thankfully
we don't have to worry about too many different kinds of pests bothering
our apples. But the ones we really care about are the Codling Moths!
Codling moths can lay eggs on the apple and soon there will have a worm
eating away. The little red "eraser" looking thing in the trap in the
picture above, has a pheromone on it that attracts the codling moths to
it. (Phermone is a yummy smell to the moths...think "cookies in the
oven" smell to us!) So if there are moths present, we will know and take
care of them!

Well, besides apples, we have other crops demanding our attention.

In
the next week or two, we will be harvesting our early ripening
blueberries! That is when things really getting hopping around here!
Our busiest time here on the farm is July and August.Other random things:
A
fun side project! We had a water leak so we had to dig down to the
mainline and see what was going on. We couldn't water our corn until
this was fixed. But all is fixed now so one more project checked off.

Corn peeking up.

Tall fescue grass seed.

We usually start harvest for our grass seed around the 4th of July. Getting closer! Yikes where does the time go!
Hope you are all enjoying it being almost summer time!

Directions

4925 Rockdale St NE
Brooks, OR 97305
(Use Salem, Oregon if using GPS)
Brooks exit #263 on I-5, (between Woodburn and Salem). Go east 1 mile, after RXR, turn left on Pueblo St. Go 2 blocks, then a quick right and then a left into the farm.